<<<<< Although Apple has heavily promoted Apple Pay as an alternative to paying with a credit card at retail stores, in apps and on websites, it has not gained much traction with consumers or merchants. >>>>>

SAN FRANCISCO -- A small Boston company, founded by the inventor of a popular corporate encryption technology called RSA SecurID, sued Apple and Visa on Sunday, arguing that the Apple Pay digital payment technology violates its patents.

The lawsuit, filed by Universal Secure Registry in Federal District Court in Delaware, says that its chief executive, Kenneth P. Weiss, received 13 patents for authentication systems that use a smartphone, biometric identification such as a fingerprint and the generation of secure one-time tokens to conduct financial transactions.

In the suit and in an interview, Mr. Weiss said he had extensive meetings in 2010 with Visa officials, including its chief executive at the time, to discuss working together on the technology. In the interview, he said that Visa had signed a 10-year nondisclosure agreement to gain access to the technology, assigned engineers to fully understand the details, but then dropped further communication without securing a license.

Mr. Weiss said he also wrote to Apple at the same time seeking to license his technology, but the iPhone maker never responded to his inquiries.

Three years later, Visa began work on the Apple Pay technology with Apple, MasterCard and American Express. Apple released Apple Pay to iPhone users in 2014.

Although Apple has heavily promoted Apple Pay as an alternative to paying with a credit card at retail stores, in apps and on websites, it has not gained much traction with consumers or merchants. Users enroll a credit card on their phone, then touch a finger to the iPhone’s Touch ID sensor to pay a merchant that has installed a wireless terminal that can receive a signal from the phone.

Universal Secure Registry did not seek a license agreement or royalties from Apple or Visa after the release of Apple Pay. Mr. Weiss said the law firm representing his company, the patent specialists Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, advised him to file the suit first.

Apple declined to comment on the suit. Visa did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple has taken an aggressive stance recently against companies seeking royalties for key patents covering its iPhones, Macs and other products. It is embroiled in bitter litigation against Nokia and Qualcomm, accusing them of demanding unfairly high royalties for technology that it uses.

Quinn Emanuel, which filed the Apple Pay suit on behalf of Universal Secure Registry, represented Samsung Electronics in some of its long-running patent litigation with Apple over software in its Android-based smartphones.

Mr. Weiss said that his company has tried to license its technology to larger firms without success and is now building its own device for secure wireless authentication.

He founded Security Dynamics in 1984 and was its chairman until 1996. Security Dynamics acquired RSA Data Security in 1996, and the two companies’ technologies were eventually combined in the RSA SecurID token system that is now used by tens of millions of people to authenticate and secure communications with corporate and government computer systems. RSA is now part of Dell EMC.

After leaving Security Dynamics, Mr. Weiss turned his attention to payment technologies and planned to license them to larger companies. He said he is still hoping to reach some kind of agreement with Apple and Visa.

“My intention is still to get into a conference room with them and resolve this,” he said.

It would be an understatement to say that the Galaxy S8 and S8+ are two successful products. According to the latest information, Samsung's 2017 flagship duo has broken the corporation's sales records, which contradicts earlier reports indicating that the S7/ S7 edge achieved greater results.

While Samsung does not officially release sales figures to the public, occasionally, we see a company representative disclosing sales numbers for certain high-profile devices like members of the Galaxy S line.

Revealing those numbers on a per case basis might be useful to reassuring customers that their phones rank high not only in terms of price but in terms of popular demand as well. Speaking to The Investor, a spokesman for the company recently put things into perspective:

The phone’s predecessors S6 and S7 hit the 10 [quatation fixed from 100m] million mark in 75 and 74 days since their launch, respectively. The S8 is selling almost two times faster than that.

These encouraging results are perhaps best seen on Samsung's home turf - South Korea. Pre-orders for the S8/S8+ began on April 7th in the East Asian country, and the chaebol (large family-owned business) reported that more than 550,000 units were reserved in the first two days. On April 18th, Samsung said that pre-orders exceeded 1 million units. This only cements the tech giant's massive 60% market share on home soil.

Currently, analysts predict that the Galaxy S8/S8+ will achieve sales of about 50.4 million units by the end of the year. The tech giant might have greater expectations than that, but as always, time will tell.

JUST IN...Pacific Crest: Sell Apple, Buy Google (AAPL, GOOGL)finance.yahoo.comPacific Crest is urging investors to refrain from buying more Apple stock insisting that the money could be better spent backing one of the company’s biggest rivals in the tech industry: Alphabet (Google). (See also: Will Alphabet overtake Apple as No.1?)

In a note, which was published on Sunday and reported on by CNBC, Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at investment banking firm Pacific Crest, downgraded Apple’s shares to sector weight from overweight, based on his concerns that the soon-to-be released iPhone 8 might not live up to the lofty expectations of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company.

"We believe AAPL anticipates strong performance in the iPhone 8 cycle, while providing relatively little weight to risks through the cycle or the potential for iPhone sales to decline in FY?19," he wrote in the note.

Aside from questioning whether the iPhone 8 can match Apple’s high sales projections, Hargreaves also argues that supply chain constraints could eat into its gross margins — and even result in a costly delay to the phone’s launch date. iPhone profit margins have reportedly been in decline over the past five years, due to the rising costs of making these increasingly sophisticated handsets.

"Recent supply checks suggest iPhone 8 (OLED) may be delayed until October, with limited initial supply that ramps through F1Q,” Hargreaves added. “Consequently, we are shifting iPhone units out of FY17 into FY18, which, along with an increase to our iPhone 8 ASP estimate, drives our FY17 EPS estimate down to $8.86 and our FY18 EPS estimate up to $10.53."

OH MY GOD...Apple malware infested crapware..The amount of malware for Macs is continuing to surgeuk.businessinsider.comJun. 23, 2017.................The number of cases of malware targeting Macs is continuing to surge, growing by 53% over just the first quarter of 2017, according to an analysis from security firm McAfee. And throughout 2016, it grew by a massive 744%.

In Q1 2017, the security firm detected more than 700,000 instances of malware on Macs. (That means it found nearly three-quarters of a million infections — not three-quarters of a million different types of malware.)......................

OH MY GOD 2....The App Store has a scamware problem and Apple needs to fix it ASAPbgr.comJune 12th, 2017..............Apple’s beloved App Store is itself home to a selection of scamware apps that essentially provide zero utility and are expressly designed to con unsuspecting users out of their hard-earned money.

In a fascinating and must-read piece that originally appeared on Medium, Johnny Lin details how a number of ostensibly security-oriented apps are generating upwards of $80,000 a month by basically tricking consumers into signing up for security-based app subscriptions that they most certainly do not need. Lin’s piece specifically hones in on an app called Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN. Yes, that’s the app’s real name and how the punctuation actually appears in the App Store.

After downloading the app and exploring a bit, Lin noticed that there were red flags at every turn. Almost immediately, the app informs him that his device is “at risk.” Not too long after, he’s presented with an opportunity to run an anti-virus scan free of charge for 7 days. Of course, the rub is that the next prompt includes a Touch ID authentication window which relays that once the 7-day trial period expires, a recurring 7-day subscription to the tune of $99.99 will commence.

The notion that something like this appears in the App Store — which Apple is supposed to keep close tabs on — is noting short of infuriating and inexcusable.

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Paying through the nose for malware and scamware infested Apple JUNK!!!!!!!!!!!! So easy to scam isheep....LMAO... too funny...